The review did a good job of explaining some of the big issues I have with WP7. My mother has had this phone for a few months over in Europe, and I got to try it out extensively on a recent visit. The phone itself is fine, nicely designed and all that. Most consumers could care less about processors and all that, and the phone certainly seemed to be nice and snappy and smooth-scrolling, more so than Android in my limited experience.
But neither my mother or I cared at all for WP7. It's certainly well put-together and smooth-scrolling, but this review and the Verge review did a good job of explaining what many people don't like about it. First of all, it just seems cumbersome and information-poor, which is extremely odd given its text-heavy aesthetic and the marketing campaign that suggests it somehow provides more information than iOS and Android. The things that don't need to be in a large font are in a huge font, substantive information is in tiny text that my mother found hard to read, there's plenty of wasted screen real estate, and you're constantly scrolling and sliding to get more information, if you even realise that you have the option of doing so. Certainly my mother found my somewhat ageing iPhone 3GS to be far more accessible and pleasing to use, though it is using the latest version of iOS.
Certainly UIs have a large subjective element, and I don't deny that there are plenty of people who love WP7. But I can't help but feel that, in classic Microsoft fashion, WP7 started out being driven by several compelling concepts, but that the elegance and effectiveness of these concepts gradually got hacked to death by focus groups, strategy meetings, marketing's half-baked ideas, engineering objections and so on.
Basically, if you are going to go in a very different direction from the top established "incumbents" (if the sector is old enough to have incumbents), then I think you need to knock it out of the park. WP7 will have a relatively small base of users who love it to bits, but it didn't knock it out of the park, and the majority of consumers will find it different enough to be off-putting without seeing a killer differentiator to make them want it.
